Optical character recognition (OCR) is a computer-based translation of an image of text into digital form as machine-editable text, generally in a standard encoding scheme. This process eliminates the need to manually type the document into the computer system. An OCR process typically begins by obtaining an electronic file of a physical document bearing the printed text message and scanning the document with a device such as an optical scanner. Such devices produce an electronic image of the original document. The output image is then supplied to a computer or other processing device and processes the image of the scanned document to differentiate between images and text and determine what letters are represented in the light and dark areas.